After 47 days on a hunger strike, Iranians Azita Aslami and Mohammad Mehdi Neshat may finally get what they want: a residence permit to stay in The Netherlands.
The Dutch government says Iran is a safe country, but Aslami and Neshat don’t agree.
They decided to quit their hunger strike on Tuesday because the Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service is now reconsidering their applications.
On June 30, eight Iranian asylum seekers had embarked on a hunger strike to protest the Dutch asylum-seeking procedure.
Since then, six had ended their protest, with some being hospitalised, leaving only Aslami and Neshat. Last Friday, three other Iranians also embarked on a hunger strike for the same reasons.
The Minister of Alien Affairs and Integration, Rita Verdonk, who is in charge of asylum procedures, recently told Dutch news agency ANP: “I don’t feel responsible when one of the Iranian asylum seekers whose applications were rejected dies.”
Before 2001, the Dutch media sporadically covered news about a group of 26Â 000 asylum seekers who had been waiting after applying for asylum under old legislation.
In 2001, the legislation changed to make it more difficult for foreigners to apply for asylum. This is when television series Project 26Â 000 saw the light.
Project 26Â 000 is produced by more than 100 Dutch filmmakers who “want to give a face to a large group of asylum seekers who will be expelled from The Netherlands over the next three years, [and explain] the feelings and view of a great [many] Dutch people [who] don’t feel … the asylum seekers have to leave”, according to its website.
Some of the 26Â 000 asylum seekers who applied for a residence permit under the old legislation have already lived in The Netherlands longer than three years, and some even for eight years.
“Most of the 26Â 000 people were already rejected earlier, but are still trying to get a permit through court. They make the decision to stay themselves,” says Verdonk on her website. “We cannot give them a residence permit now, because then it will look as if going to court and waiting gets rewarded.”
From the group of 26Â 000, 5Â 000 have left The Netherlands. A thousand returned to their home countries voluntarily, 300 were deported and 1Â 700 got residence permits. About 2Â 000 people left the special accommodation facilities without a designated destination and “disappeared”.
By the end of next year, the remaining asylum seekers must either have a residence permit or leave the country.
On her website, the minister says: “If their application is rejected, we will help them return via an individual departure project. I know this leads to good results, since never before so many asylum seekers have used these facilities to return to their home country.”
In 2004, almost 10Â 000 people asked for asylum in The Netherlands, and 4Â 050 got a resident permit. Most of the asylum seekers originate from Surinam, Morocco, Turkey, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, the Dutch Antilles and Aruba, and Tunisia. They seek work in The Netherlands or stay with family members who are already there.
Many asylum seekers nowadays live in special small facilities, far away from the cities. They share rooms with other families and often don’t have private bathrooms or toilets. Each of them receives â,¬38 (about R300) per week for food and clothes.
The Dutch government pays for basic medical attention, but asylum seekers often struggle to find a doctor, a translator and transport.
Dutch people often know asylum seekers in their neighbourhood, at work or school, or have joined protests regarding small children who are sent back to their home countries, despite being fully integrated into Dutch society: they have Dutch friends, go to a Dutch school and speak Dutch.
The children are forced to return to their parents’ country of origin; a country they have never been to, where they don’t speak the language and which doesn’t have good schools and medical facilities such as those in The Netherlands.
Human Rights Watch, an international human rights organisation, is not happy with the situation in The Netherlands. It says the quota of people who are being refused, in order to discourage new people coming into the country, is more important to the government than checking if the home countries of those who are rejected are safe.
“We fear that the current deportation proposals represent a further degradation of The Netherlands’ commitment to the right to seek asylum and the principle of nonrefoulement [not sending refugees back to their countries if their lives or freedom are threatened there], and signal a continuing and disturbing trend on the part of Dutch authorities to depart from international standards in its treatment of asylum seekers and migrants,” Human Rights Watch says on its website.
The Dutch government is working to integrate successful asylum seekers better into society by forcing them to complete an integration course. New asylum seekers have to pass a Dutch language exam in their own country and need to have an income of more than 120% of the minimum wage.
Says Verdonk on her website: “Immigrants have to pay for their residence permit themselves. With this, the Dutch government will make â,¬15-million in 2007.”